{"id":231220,"date":"2010-01-26T08:59:08","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T13:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/01\/26\/new-novartis-ceo-cafepharma-reader-former-heinz-exec\/"},"modified":"2010-01-26T08:59:08","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T13:59:08","slug":"new-novartis-ceo-cafepharma-reader-former-heinz-exec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/231220","title":{"rendered":"New Novartis CEO: Cafepharma Reader, Former Heinz Exec"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jimenez\"Joe Jimenez will be the new CEO of Novartis, the big Swiss drug company said<\/a>. Dan Vasella, who has been CEO for 14 years and chairman for 11 years, will stay on as chairman.<\/p>\n

Some other Swiss firms — including Nestl\u00e9<\/a> and Roche<\/a> — have also recently split the chairman and CEO positions, partly in response to a push from corporate-governance activists who favor the split. It’s worth noting, though, that Novartis’s board recommends against a shareholder proposal to make the chairman-CEO split mandatory (see p. 6 of this PDF<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Jimenez has been running Novartis’s prescription drug business since 2007. He spent most of his career in the packaged goods industry, with stints at H.J. Heinz, Clorox and ConAgra. As we noted<\/a> in 2008, Jimenez brought the “key account management” strategy to the business. In packaged goods, key accounts are big retailers; in the drugs business, key accounts are insurers and other big payers.<\/p>\n

Another detail about Jimenez that may interest some drug-industry insiders: He reads Cafepharma<\/a>, the home of online message boards full of posts from sales reps and others in the industry. “I read it because I like to get information from a lot of different places,” Jimenez told the Health Blog<\/a> a while back.<\/p>\n

For more on Jimenez, Vasella, and the rest of Novartis’s executive shake-up, see this story<\/a> from the WSJ.<\/p>\n

Photo: Associated Press<\/em><\/p>\n

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Joe Jimenez will be the new CEO of Novartis, the big Swiss drug company said. Dan Vasella, who has been CEO for 14 years and chairman for 11 years, will stay on as chairman. Some other Swiss firms — including Nestl\u00e9 and Roche — have also recently split the chairman and CEO positions, partly in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}